Semiconductor device fabrication equipment components tend to accumulate contaminants, through for example, adsorption and absorption, before, during, and/or after the operation of the fabrication equipment. Such contaminants include, for example, moisture, oxygen, atmosphere, or any other gases. Possible contaminant sources are process gases as well as the atmosphere. Even components that have been cleaned, by cleaning processes known in the art, or that are new, are subject to accumulation of contaminants. Thus, the components of the semiconductor device fabrication equipment become a source of contaminants, in addition to process gases. Contaminants on components are undesirable for at least the reasons that they degrade the quality of the fabricated semiconductor device manufactured and reduce the efficiency of the fabrication process.
Where the method of semiconductor device fabrication involves depositing epitaxially-grown silicon germanium (SiGe) on a silicon substrate in a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) reactor, during SiGe deposition, oxygen present in the CVD reactor is typically incorporated into the SiGe film. Elevated oxygen levels present in the CVD reaction chamber used to deposit SiGe causes numerous problems in the SiGe films produced in the CVD reactor chamber. Among these problems are elevated sheet resistance of the SiGe p-type base and poor crystal quality.
Additionally, as the amount of absorbed or adsorbed contaminants, such as oxygen, increases, the amount of time for which the reactor must be taken offline typically increases in order to achieve acceptable oxygen levels in SiGe films. While the reactor is offline, it is disassembled to remove contaminants, reassembled, and then tested. The longer the reactor is offline, the less cost effective manufacturing becomes, as an offline reactor cannot be used for manufacturing semiconductor chips.
Also, elevated contaminant levels in the reactor components may lead to early reactor failure and a decreased reactor lifetime.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a system, method, and apparatus for reduction or elimination of contaminants found in semiconductor device fabrication equipment components.
It is another object of the present invention to reduce or eliminate levels of contaminants on semiconductor device fabrication equipment components.
It is a further object of the present invention to improve the quality of semiconductor devices manufactured with semiconductor device fabrication equipment.
Additional objects of the present invention are to reduce preventative maintenance recovery time, process recovery time, and mean time to repair (MTTR) and to increase mean time between interrupt (MTBI) and mean time between cleans (MTBC).